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On this date, March 25, in 1957, Allen Ginsberg helped make literary history. That's because 520 copies of his poem "Howl" were seized by U.S. Customs agents on charges of obscenity. Ginsberg and his publisher, City Lights, would fight those charges -- and win. "The judge ruled that you couldn't judge a work obscene if it had the 'slightest redeeming social significance,'" City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti told PBS' "NewHour" in 2002. "That was the key phrase, which held up. This was a precedent that really opened the floodgates and allowed the Grove Press in New York, for instance, to publish D.H. Lawrence's...

Related "D.H. Lawrence" Articles

On this date, March 25, in 1957, Allen Ginsberg helped make literary history. That's because 520 copies of his poem "Howl" were seized by U.S. Customs agents on charges of obscenity. Ginsberg and his publisher, City Lights, would fight those...

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition
Selected Essays and Reviews
Geoff Dyer
Graywolf: 422 pp., $18 paper
"Almost as soon as I began writing for magazines and newspapers," Geoff Dyer tells us in the introduction to "Otherwise Known...

East of the West
A Country in Stories
Miroslav Penkov
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 226 pp., $24
Miroslav Penkov hit American shores in 2001 (he was 21) from his native Bulgaria, and he hasn't stopped writing (or winning prizes for his wild, homesick...

I am sitting on the balcony of the Grand Hotel Timeo eating almond-flavored granita (a kind of Italian sherbet) for breakfast and thinking about Lady Chatterley. More accurately, I am thinking about the real-life inspiration for Lady Chatterley — an...

The bride was beautiful. The groom was a handsome prince. Two billion people around the world watched the wedding ceremony performed in April in Westminster Abbey.
I was one of them. Even though my London flat is around the corner from the abbey, my best...

Michael Stern Hart, a burly rebel whose vision of a literate society led him to pioneer the electronic book decades before the spread of the Internet, has died. He was 64.
The founder of the online library Project Gutenberg, Hart had been in poor...

Ken Russell, the often controversial British director known for his flamboyant visual style in films such as "The Devils," "Altered States" and the Who's rock opera "Tommy," has died. He was 84.
Russell, who lived in...

Shulamith Firestone, whose 1970 book "The Dialectic of Sex" became a feminist classic with its calls for a drastic rethinking of women's roles in the bearing and raising of children, was found dead Tuesday in her New York City apartment. She was...

Actress Sylvia Kristel, the Dutch star of the hit 1970s erotic movie "Emmanuelle," has died of cancer in the Netherlands. She was 60.Kristel died in her sleep Wednesday night, according to a statement from her agent, Features Creative...

Curiosity for Rent: Harvard Apartments, Koreatown No one may have asked architect Stephen Kanner if he designed the whimsically skewed Harvard Apartments to annoy the neighbors, but after nearly 20 years, the 14-unit building punched with odd windows in Koreat

Bruce Chatwin, the brilliant English writer and stylish nomad, died from AIDS in late 1989. His memorial service, held in a Greek Orthodox Cathedral in London on the day that Ayatollah Khomeini handed a death sentence to Chatwin's friend Salman Rushdie,...

Jeff in Venice,
Death in Varanasi
A Novel
Geoff Dyer
Pantheon: 296 pp., $24
Why do education and cynicism so often go hand in hand? Heaven forbid an intellectual should be wholehearted or, God help us, earnest about anything. Geoff Dyer is an...

" 'I must not,' said Jane, 'think of rats.' And proceeded to think of them as hard as she could." Bland, boring sentence, right? When I tell class after class of writing students that this one sentence -- plucked many decades ago from a...

CRITICISM IN AMERICAN CULTURE: New releases
Here are five titles that put the lie to the notion that criticism is a dying art.
Corn Flakes With
John Lennon
And Other Tales from
a Rock 'n' Roll Life
Robert Hilburn
Rodale: 280 pp., $24.99
Hilburn,...